Archive for September, 2008

The title of this year’s St Bride Conference is Letterpress: A Celebration. Anyone who reads about the history of printing soon comes in contact with the St Bride Library, so it is a great honour to Phil to have been asked to speak at the conference. He intends to talk about how he came to start Hand & Eye, what we do now and how we do it, all profusely illustrated. We will also have an exhibition stand where Phil and Rosa will be pleased to see you.

The conference takes place on Friday 7 November from 9.30 am to 5 pm.

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It’s exactly a year since we came to Pinchin Street. It has been a really positive move. There have been a couple of large changes in that time: Patrick Randle and Ross Shaw are no longer working with us and Rosa has filled the gap. And we have introduced our work experience programme. Nick is the eighth participant and we have two more booked in.

We have also expanded our range of type, and we’ll be updating the list on the website once we have tackled making a new table.

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Nick has joined us for two weeks work experience. He is a writer and musician who wanted to print CD covers for his band. He bought an Adana press and some type, and is with us to learn a bit more about the process.

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Many people these days think letterpress is only good for short runs. When our Heidelbergs were built in the early 1960s they were the hi-tech machines of the age, capable of printing dead register work at high speeds. Today’s presses are much faster, or course, put we still can and do long runs. We have just printed 240,000 of these wine labels for our friends and neighbours at Vesuvius International. The black labels were printed in silver first and the yellow was then overprinted. As we had 40 of them up on a sheet sized 640 x 480 mm getting them in register wasn’t easy, but we got there.

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The weather for the Whittington Summer Show was as miserable as we have come to expect. It didn’t spoil the day, though. We were put in charge of the Whittington proofing press, and we set this specimen in their fine 60 pt Walbaum Medium Italic. The green was what they had on the press and the paper was an offcut of Somerset Velvet that we took with us. We printed demonstrated the printing of them, and many of the visitors printed their own copies.

We also took with us a poster that Rosa had produced. The grey type, rather hard to read here, says ‘The spoken word flies away but the written one remains’.